(CNN) — Sometimes, a massive typo is right in front of your eyes and you can't see it. For Hong Kong-based airline Cathay Pacific, it was between the "i"s -- on the livery of its Boeing 777-367. In a move that's had the Internet asking "WTF?" ("Where's the F?"), photos emerged Wednesday morning appearing to show a plane on the tarmac at Hong Kong airport, proudly emblazoned with the words "CATHAY PACIIC." (www.cnn.com) 更多...

I can definitely see this as an accident. Somewhere, someone typed "CATHAY PACIIC" into a program, and that's all she wrote. An enormous plotter started cutting out pieces of vinyl far too large to read as a whole, producing a stack of sections. The team applying it started at the right end so it could be aligned with the door and end of the windows, and worked backward through the name. The letters are 4' high, and the workers were within a foot or two handling the floppy material; they couldn't see more than a couple of letters at a time. Then, when done, they turned their backs and went on to their next tasks.

Not surprised. We have had a local high school being rebuilt/remodeled for the last 3 years. Just as this school year was about to begin, it took a student to realize that the high school name on one end of the new basketball court was misspelled. Hopefully the same attention to detail isn’t being given to our new airliners as they’re being built. To quote one of my old chiefs...”Any job, big or small, do it right or not at all”.

It takes at least 12 people to apply and review the application of the stencils. A few people have to sign off for the acceptance of the work from the work contractor who did the job...Not to mention the captain of the flight will perform his visual inspection prior to the flight and not notice. come on ...

I saw a similar thing when I worked for a barge manufacturer. My job was to photograph the launch, and when I stood a distance away at launch time, I noticed they had painted the very large name of the owner "INGRAM" backwards - it read "MARGNI". We quickly painted over all the letters except the R which, could still be used, and launched the boat.

Meh, I concern myself less with what's painted on the outside, compared to their world class customer service on the inside- which for any of us who have flown C/P....is in a different galactical zip code from anything the US carriers offer.

perhaps the paint crew leader spoke with a lisp, and delivered verbal directions to the painters, and phonetically that is what he sounded like. give it a rest..... the inside is where the real genius is expressed.

About 15 years ago a huge road sign at Villawood (Sydney Australia) was installed reading LIVEPROOL. It was there for months before the mistake was noticed. It was so large that a panel with just "RP" was made to cover the mistake. It's still visible if you look closely.

I'm not at all surprised after seeing the lack of excellence when it comes to so many things these days...and don't EVEN get me started on the ignorance and illiteracy one sees at social sites with the comments and even with the writing/lack of or lousy proofreading of articles put out by various news outlets.

i am enjoying all the serious comments about this classic spoof and attention getter. We are not talking about the safety of the aircraft, the competence of the flight crews,- nothing really vital. This could be the airline's riff on the "Name Change " of International House of Pancakes into some burger shack- free publicity and manufactured outrage.

Many years ago, I worked at an advertising agency. The proofreaders had a foolproof method: 1. Read through for content and continuity 2. Read through backwards, forcing you to read on a word level. It works beautifully.

Well, if they can't get their name spelled correctly, and no one caught it until the plane was on display, it does make one wonder how really important things, like aircraft maintenance, are handled. This was a mistake that shouldn't have left the hanger.

Suppose you as an English speaker/reader worked in the aircraft engineering field.

Now you would likely perform engineering to an exceptional standard.

Now suppose you worked in decoration and were asked for example to apply the Arabic writing to an Emirates, Qatar or Etihad aircraft, or the Chinese characters to a Chinese airline or any other aircraft requiring words from a language you don’t speak, let alone read or write... The likelyhood of you making what seems an ‘obvious’ error to someone who does read those words is massively increased.

The other thing you need to understand is that a word written in any language in a four foot tall font does not look even look like that word when you are one foot away. Couple that with the fact that you’re actually looking at the word in the form of parts of a character spanned across multiple pieces of a stencil and you’ll certainly not notice the error.

Makes me wonder why the stencil wouldn't be the entire word rather than individual letters. That way, no spelling problems, no language problems, no spacing problems, etc. Slap that puppy on and get to painting.

Because it would be all but impossible to handle a single stencil that large! Painting masks are always arranged out of manageable sized pieces assembled into the pattern on the object. Consider the money and effort wasted if a single large sencil is stretched out of proportion or torn in application and the whole thing needs to be scrapped and cut again.

This is the first large case of a ‘typographical’ error on an aircraft witnessed in a long time, clearly the existing systems work in nearly every case.